By Corinne Duffy

“Hey can you tell me what direction the threes are in?” a visitor asked Doug Babcock, director of public safety, on the first Saturday of the fall semester. On their walk to the 300s townhouses, Babcock asked the guest several questions, and the guest refused to answer. “You can tell me your friend’s name, or you can start walking that way to Route 15,” Babcock told the guest.

With the combination of fights that broke out on Derby Day last May and the ongoing presence of outsiders on campus on the weekends, Residence Life and Public Safety at St. Michael’s college have been taking strides to enforce the guest policy on campus.
“There are guests that come that aren’t affiliated with anyone,” said Jeff Vincent, coordinator of community standards & student conduct and assistant dean of students. “They’re just showing up here and hanging out trying to find something social to do on campus.”
By contrast, there is the guest that is invited to the campus by a student. “We register guests, and we welcome people to the community that have respect and a tie,” said Babcock. Students are held accountable for anything a guest does while visiting.

“Most of the incidents that I have dealt with this semester in the townhouse areas have been with non-students,” said Samantha Prue, ’18, a resident assistant of the 200s townhouses. “It’s so easy to tell when people aren’t St. Mike’s students by their behavior.”
Babcock has contacts at UVM, Champlain, and Norwich. When there is a student from any of those schools causing trouble on St. Michael’s campus, those contacts are notified, and then those contacts discipline those students as they see fit.

 

Derby Day Disaster
“Part of the reason we’re focused on it this year is because Derby Day last year was a disaster,” Babcock said.“Eight different people that we had to throw off campus for fighting, aggressive behavior, were not students.” Derby Day is an event that occurs on campus on the same day as the Kentucky Derby.

“We were getting stuff thrown at us, and it was going south,” Babcock said. That was when they realized they needed to send a message.

Eight police cars were lined up across the 300s field, two of them public safety vehicles, and the other six police vehicles from four neighboring towns. The entire Public Safety staff was present, including Babcock himself.

The cars all lined up at the edge of the 3’s field with their lights on. All the officers got out of their vehicles and stood there for about two minutes, then began a slow, measured walk toward the townhouses. Once the officers were close enough to students, they began to yell, “Go home, party’s over, get out of here.”

“We were very intentional about how we did it because we needed a very strong message to be sent,” Babcock said.

“What we did by doing that was give everybody who really didn’t want to get wrapped up in this plenty of time to get out of there. We didn’t chase anybody, we didn’t cover the exits, we didn’t surround, we didn’t corner people, we set it up so that everybody could just go home.” Babcock said this gave students the opportunity to leave without getting in trouble.

“It’s a privilege to have a guest here,”Vincent said. “We want [students] to relay to their guest how important it is, like you know, ‘this is my home, please treat it like my home,” Vincent said. He said this year he strives to have students be more aware of the policy, which can be found on the school website, and how their guests are behaving while visiting the campus.